"Actual" value of a regular pack?
 

Has anyone tracked the numbers to see what the average re-sale value of a pack is? I know it's basically a given that it's a loss to buy packs, but I'm curious just how much. My gut would say somewhere around 500-600 pp in value, but I could be way off. I'd be curious about the Gold Packs too if anyone has done all this

I did a spreadsheet of expected number of cards by type for an earlier discussion about Regular packs and Gold packs and which was a better value.

Using that information, the average value of one regular pack based on probabilities is 501.67PPs. Based on 3000PPs per pack, the average value of a Gold pack is 1476.67PPs.

I wouldn’t go by the stated odds to predict a value. The biggest variable is the value of the platinum and perfect cards that you pull. Just a couple of top historical cards can skew the average value very quickly.

10 Garden Variety Beans. Just about Quit playing tournaments. a Regular Pack of cards is junk. I've opened around 30 packs & never even won a Gold card....Silver only....No Thanks

Stick with it on the tournaments to get packs. Most cards will be garbage but the good ones are out there. Early this season I pulled a 100 PEAK Hughie Jennings at SS and just last week I got a 93 Mantle 1955 card and 97 PEAK Webb who has slid beautifully into my rotation. It doesn’t take many lucky pulls to have value. Also, there are a bunch of bronze and silver cards which people will pay for in the AH. You can supplement your points nicely with packs that seem average.

Never say never!

Before I had only pulled perfect live cards but just Friday I won a pack in a tournament with my pack only team and lo and behold I pulled the perfect SE Jackie Robinson. So don´t give up hope. :)

SE Jackie can't be pulled in packs, he's only a reward for doing the Negro League set. Surely it was something else?

Presumably the regular Negro League Perfect Jackie, which is a bit worse than the SE but still a great card.

Yeah, sorry guys, that´s the one I meant. Too many cards to keep up with these days!

But yeah, definitely a success story. :)

Good enough to make my pack only(:p) team very jealous :).

It certainly made my non-pack only teams very jealous as well! :D

For pack only teams, this is the kind of pull you dream about. To illustrate the point, Jackie replaced Nicky Lopez 64 at 2b, so quite a step up I would say.

Assuming the card odds shown on the pack purchasing screen are accurate, the average value of a pack just from the minimum guaranteed price you can get from instant sales is slightly under 500pp. Since the only difference between a Standard Pack and a Gold Pack is the single guaranteed card, the Gold pack minimum sale is obviously 975pp higher.


I haven't gone any further with the calculations yet, but based only on the ratios of the odds of pulling a particular tier of card vs. the minimum prices as compared to the baseline iron... most of the value is in the Gold+ cards, so you have to open a lot of packs to get that average value. I suspect that also means that the real average value is close to even or higher, given the number of top-tier cards that go for far above minimum. (But the gold packs couldn't possibly make up for the premium associated with buying them, since the golds are frequently sold near minimum value as a result of the existence of gold packs. Based on what I've seen in the auction house, I'd venture a guess that the lack of silver packs makes silver cards better payouts proportionally than gold.)

Incidentally, an easy way to think of the value proposition of buying gold packs is to keep in mind that the ONLY difference is that you're swapping a guaranteed bronze out for a guaranteed gold. So you need the difference in the average value between the bronze and the gold to make up for the difference in cost.


Yes, that means you need to be able to sell the gold card you get for at least 2,025 points. On average. Good luck with that.

I tend to agree. I am not after Gold cards. I want strong Diamond and Perfect cards which means that I am looking for a volume of cards as I try to get lucky. I’ve been getting my packs through tournaments so it is somewhat of a moot point but I woke up to find I had won five regular packs from the three tournaments I entered before bed. After a recent dry spell, the last card from the last pack was a 95 Johnny Mize 1946 All-Star card. I am not in a rush to dump it, but with the Bagwell card in hand I have it up in the AH to see if I can get a surge of points to address other need areas.

EDIT: The Mize card sold for 53,000 PP. It would seem that I could have gotten a bit more for it but I’ll call that a good haul from a regular pack pull. Now...where to spend those points.

Hi,

I've opened 3355 packs (F2P, so from missions, tournaments and 'excess PP') and kept record of the contents. Because I'm crazy.
I used the following estimated average values for each card type: Brz. 50, Silver 300, Gold 1500, Diamond 6000, Perfect 25000.
Based on these values, my 'ROI' was 2.336.500 PP for 3.355.000 PP worth of packs, which is 69.64%.

Of course, there are individual cards which can have such a huge impact on whether or not buying packs ends up being 'worth it' that you can't realistically put an average value on a pack.

For example, I should have packed 16.775 Perfect cards ((3350*5)/1000) by now, but only packed 13. That wouldn't be too bad, were it not that 12 out of these 13 were live cards (despite a supposed 70/30 live/non-live split being in effect.)
A player with even average results in this area will have a vastly different outlook on the average value of packs than I do.

Lastly, I can confirm that the stated drop rates more or less check out. For me, bronzes have dropped at 98% of the expected rate, silvers at 100%, golds at 125%, diamonds at 118% and perfects at 77%.

In a similar vein, has anyone calculated the expected value of a Historical Pack? They cost... 10k PP, right? So when I'm evaluating whether or not a mission that awards Historical Packs is worth pursuing I put down the "value" as 10k when that's really the cost. I'd rather use a more realistic figure if anyone has done any analysis (and I'm sure the expected value is more on the order of 5k but it'd be nice to have a number based more on data than on feelings).

Don't know if anyone has purchased or collated enough results to have a good feel for this but if you have any data, it would be welcomed!

I just pulled a 100 Maddux yesterday with a tournament pack.

To be fair though, that is by far the best card I've pulled from any pack in 3 years of playing this game.

I’ve had a pretty good run with the packs I get from tournaments since I started being active in them about a month ago. I’m probably averaging 6 packs a day from the tournaments. In the last month I have pulled a 100 PEAK Hughie Jennings, a 97 PEAK Brandon Webb, a 95 Johnny Mize 1946, a 93 Mickey Mantle 1955, and a fair number of gold cards which I have been selling unless they are part of interesting collection missions. I know that I’ll have dry spells but I’m sold that tournaments are the key to building a strong F2P team.

BTW, love the avatar Prof. Ape. Looooooved Greg the Bunny for the short time it was on the air :D

ronhatch. Your numbers are slightly off. Don't forget that a reg pack includes ONE GUARANTEED bronze card. That pushes the AEV based on probabilities to just over 500.